So I saw Barbie (imo: 8⁄10, worth watching, silly in mostly the right ways) with a housemate and had an interesting conversation about children’s media with her afterwards; she’s a mother of a young child and sees a lot of children’s books that are about some sort of cultural education, like a book just about pronouns. And I mentioned that I feel weird about this sort of thing: it feels like it must have been a cultural universal (tell your child the social order that they’re going to grow up into in an approving way), but there feels something off about our culture’s version of it. Like, it often foregrounds being rebellious and subversive in a way that seems just totally fake.
Like, I think when my mom grew up she was actually something of a feminist hero—was in the 3rd or 4th class at the Air Force academy that allowed women, had a successful career in a technical field, marriage, and motherhood—but hypothetical female me growing up a generation later would have faced only the slightest of barriers in comparison. Like, actual gay me ran into one or two issues, but it’s basically been a low level of human hardship, compared to hypothetical ten-years-older gay me. And I don’t really see that difference acknowledged much in media?
[Scientific American put out an article titled “What the Film Oppenheimer Probably Will Not Talk About: The Lost Women of the Manhattan Project.” But as you might expect for a film made in 2023, it does talk about it; as I recall, after describing how the project employed a bunch of the wives as typists, there’s a woman complaining to Oppenheimer that she was asked if she knew how to type; he responds with something like “do you?” and she says “well, they didn’t teach that at the graduate chemistry program”, and then he puts her on the chemistry team. She gets as many spoken lines as Feynman (who also goes unnamed). There’s something that I find offensively obtuse about Scientific American’s choice of title. What probability did they put on ‘probably’, and will they react at all to having publicly lost that bet?]
When I imagine growing up in 1800s Britain or w/e, I expect the pedagogical children’s media (such as it is) to be very pro-Empire, pro-being-a-good-citizen, and so on; when I imagine it talking about change, I imagine it being mostly about real progress, instead of reaction to a mostly defeated foe.
[The ‘psychologically normal level of crime’ seems relevant here; this is Durkheim’s idea that, as crime rates drop, the definition of crime expands so that the actual ‘crime rate’ will stay the same. If rapes are down, start counting sexual assaults too; if sexual assaults are down, start counting harassment also, etc.; this maintains crime’s role as “gradient towards progress” while being practical about enforcement capacity.]
But thinking about this I realized that… I’m probably not actually thinking about the right sort of cultural education, or thinking about things from the moralist’s perspective in those times. I’m used to thinking of 1800s Britain as “a time when everyone was Christian” and not used to thinking about how nominal that Christianity was; the actual historical people-who-took-Christianity-seriously viewed themselves as more like “lonely outcasts fighting popular indifference and bad behavior”, much in the same way I can imagine modern feminists feeling. They probably talked both about progress and decline, in much the same way that we talk about both progress and decline.
[I still wish they would be honest about having won as much as the historical Christians had won, about being the Orthodoxy instead of the Rebellion, but… I can see how, when the core story disagrees with reality, the media treatment is going to stick with the core story. It’s not like the historical Christians said “we’re a cultural institution that makes some fake claims about the supernatural”!]
There is a paradox inherent in complaining about oppression: the most oppressed people are not even allowed to complain, so the fact that you complain about being oppressed is simultaneously evidence that the oppression is… not at the strongest level.
For example, during communism, very few people complained publicly about lack of free speech. (Those who did, were quickly taken away by police, sometimes never to be seen again.) Today, in the post-communist countries, people complain about censorship and lack of free speech all the time, typically because someone disagreed with their opinion on covid or the recent war. Going by the number of complaints, one might easily conclude that he situation with free speech is much worse today… and some people indeed make this conclusion.
I am not saying that if you are allowed to complain, it means that all oppression and discrimination are gone. But the relation between “how much people are oppressed” and “how much people complain about oppression” is non-monotonous.
I don’t have a good solution to figure out who is most oppressed, because “these people have nothing to complain about” and “these people are too afraid to complain” may look the same from outside; also a nutjob from the former group may seem similar to a lonely hero from the latter group.
So I saw Barbie (imo: 8⁄10, worth watching, silly in mostly the right ways) with a housemate and had an interesting conversation about children’s media with her afterwards; she’s a mother of a young child and sees a lot of children’s books that are about some sort of cultural education, like a book just about pronouns. And I mentioned that I feel weird about this sort of thing: it feels like it must have been a cultural universal (tell your child the social order that they’re going to grow up into in an approving way), but there feels something off about our culture’s version of it. Like, it often foregrounds being rebellious and subversive in a way that seems just totally fake.
Like, I think when my mom grew up she was actually something of a feminist hero—was in the 3rd or 4th class at the Air Force academy that allowed women, had a successful career in a technical field, marriage, and motherhood—but hypothetical female me growing up a generation later would have faced only the slightest of barriers in comparison. Like, actual gay me ran into one or two issues, but it’s basically been a low level of human hardship, compared to hypothetical ten-years-older gay me. And I don’t really see that difference acknowledged much in media?
[Scientific American put out an article titled “What the Film Oppenheimer Probably Will Not Talk About: The Lost Women of the Manhattan Project.” But as you might expect for a film made in 2023, it does talk about it; as I recall, after describing how the project employed a bunch of the wives as typists, there’s a woman complaining to Oppenheimer that she was asked if she knew how to type; he responds with something like “do you?” and she says “well, they didn’t teach that at the graduate chemistry program”, and then he puts her on the chemistry team. She gets as many spoken lines as Feynman (who also goes unnamed). There’s something that I find offensively obtuse about Scientific American’s choice of title. What probability did they put on ‘probably’, and will they react at all to having publicly lost that bet?]
When I imagine growing up in 1800s Britain or w/e, I expect the pedagogical children’s media (such as it is) to be very pro-Empire, pro-being-a-good-citizen, and so on; when I imagine it talking about change, I imagine it being mostly about real progress, instead of reaction to a mostly defeated foe.
[The ‘psychologically normal level of crime’ seems relevant here; this is Durkheim’s idea that, as crime rates drop, the definition of crime expands so that the actual ‘crime rate’ will stay the same. If rapes are down, start counting sexual assaults too; if sexual assaults are down, start counting harassment also, etc.; this maintains crime’s role as “gradient towards progress” while being practical about enforcement capacity.]
But thinking about this I realized that… I’m probably not actually thinking about the right sort of cultural education, or thinking about things from the moralist’s perspective in those times. I’m used to thinking of 1800s Britain as “a time when everyone was Christian” and not used to thinking about how nominal that Christianity was; the actual historical people-who-took-Christianity-seriously viewed themselves as more like “lonely outcasts fighting popular indifference and bad behavior”, much in the same way I can imagine modern feminists feeling. They probably talked both about progress and decline, in much the same way that we talk about both progress and decline.
[I still wish they would be honest about having won as much as the historical Christians had won, about being the Orthodoxy instead of the Rebellion, but… I can see how, when the core story disagrees with reality, the media treatment is going to stick with the core story. It’s not like the historical Christians said “we’re a cultural institution that makes some fake claims about the supernatural”!]
There is a paradox inherent in complaining about oppression: the most oppressed people are not even allowed to complain, so the fact that you complain about being oppressed is simultaneously evidence that the oppression is… not at the strongest level.
For example, during communism, very few people complained publicly about lack of free speech. (Those who did, were quickly taken away by police, sometimes never to be seen again.) Today, in the post-communist countries, people complain about censorship and lack of free speech all the time, typically because someone disagreed with their opinion on covid or the recent war. Going by the number of complaints, one might easily conclude that he situation with free speech is much worse today… and some people indeed make this conclusion.
I am not saying that if you are allowed to complain, it means that all oppression and discrimination are gone. But the relation between “how much people are oppressed” and “how much people complain about oppression” is non-monotonous.
I don’t have a good solution to figure out who is most oppressed, because “these people have nothing to complain about” and “these people are too afraid to complain” may look the same from outside; also a nutjob from the former group may seem similar to a lonely hero from the latter group.